The Donation Room

A dorm of 250 young ladies is bound to be a crazy mess of a time during move-out season, and my girls have been leaving since May 15th-ish.  Graduation day was yesterday, and now the leaving begins in earnest--they have to be gone by Sunday afternoon.  In the meantime, this year's move-out has been particularly felt on my end because I ended up volunteering to coordinate a donation room for students to donate food, clothing, school books, the whole nine yards.  The first day, not much happened...and I was lulled into the false sense that people will be neat, be efficient in their packing, and it won't be that big a deal to coordinate.

Famous last words.

I've spent at least an hour every evening for the past two weeks organizing and bagging clothes, throwing out stained underwear (really?!) and piling books.  As it's an open room, the students have been rummaging through it as well, and there seems to be a steady stream of new items appearing, old items disappearing.  And for someone who is as organized as I am, waking up in the morning and heading to work seeing all the efforts of the night before completely undone, it's a little maddening.  Great practice for having children one day, I'm sure.

Last night a guest stayed at my place, and it was the first night I hadn't done the requisite tidying up.  Here's a taste of the before:

And the same room, three and a half hours later:

The clothes and shoes are being taken out to the suburbs by a staff member and donated to one of the pickup clothing drives, and housewares will most likely be taken to goodwill at some point.  Books are being donated to the start of a library in the hometown of a student who was killed in a bicycle accident this past year.  The other things, especially the giant cache of hangers, the eight lamps, these may stick around for other students to use next year. 

But really, all I have to say is next year, I'm enlisting more help to start with.